london fields iv

 It’s been quite a while since I posted one of these accounts. As you English readers will be aware the early January weather of 2010  has not been particularly conducive to any investigations of our glorious capital but since the snow has evaporated, since the Hyperborean chill has dissipated I find myself with no excuse not to complete some activities I’ve had planned over the past few months and in some cases years. I’ve checked out an exhibition and visited the cavernous National Portrait Gallery again when I was in town for some shopping, I also plan to embark on a proper investigation of the cultural facilities of nearby Greenwich and finally fulfil a trip around the Tower Of London which is now unavoidable as I can get in for the princely sum of £1 – as opposed to the exorbitant £17 for tourists – as I have acquired a Council ‘idea’ card (which back in my youth was called a library card) that is available to all Tower Hamlets residents. There’s no excuse now really as the historic citadel is located a brief half hour walk from my yard, westward through the Thames Pathway which is always an exhilarating saunter. But I digress…

This may get a little lengthy so let’s begin with a soundtrack to my endeavour, a clip of the musician Zoe Keating whose work I recently discovered courtesy of the fantastic WNYC RadioLab podcast. The broadcast is a science, culture and technology themed show that eloquently compacts a series of aural chapters which circumnavigate one central unifying theme –  the episode on Keating’s work led me to download her albums which provided a suitably atmospheric soundtrack to my recent expedition, both her work and the podcast are awesome and come highly recommended. Zoe doesn’t know it yet but she will be hired to provide the soundtrack to the mournful, futuristic Gothic western that I haven’t written or imagined yet, Deadwood with wormholes or something. So yeah, now I’m getting into avant-garde cellists, still it was quite apt when you throw the likes of Wendy Carlos into the mix – all will become clear gentle reader…

 For many years I’ve meant to perform something of a pilgrimage to a film location where certain portions of A Clockwork Orange was shot, having lived in a couple of places in West London until my relatively recent move this proved to be something of a difficult proposition as the Thamesmead estate is located way out in the wilds of Zone 4 South East London – quite an expedition. Since my bivouac to Limehouse however I’ve had no excuse other than the usual distractions of work and alternative weekend activities, I’m happy to report that this week I finally got this errand completed on a suitably grim January morning. As an aside you have to love the future, leaping from one various public transport method to another to complete this absurd task it was quite reassuring to monitor my progress on my phone, its GPS functions simultaneously charting my movements whilst I also browsed the web to certify the precise locations I needed to visit to comprehensively complete my mission and curiously certify the accuracy of my mission with youtube footage once completed – see below.

 I’ve been to some grim places in London, I’ve worked in some of the most deprived, depressing areas of the metropolis but my god, this was something else. The estate is almost a physical manifestation of the word ‘bleak’, infected with litter and festooned with graffiti, almost a picture perfect representation of ‘Broken Britain’. Its a good job I completed this task early as quite frankly I would have concerns for my safety in this part of the world after nightfall, the volumes of discarded White Lightning Cider bottles and Tennant’s Super cans spoke volumes. Anyway, take a look at that second photo and then have a viddy at this, unfortunately embedding is prohibited but you can see the location in all its glory – real horrorshow. Just round the corner was the  location of the scene immediately preceding Alex’s reassertment of his superiority, in the entry basement of ‘Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North’, alas I can’t find a suitable clip to refresh your memories. I know, I know – with London being the host of one of the worlds most expansive and prestigious cultural treats on offer I opt to go and see a miserable council estate in Bexley, I evidently need to get my head examined. What I can say, it wasn’t quite a religious experience but it’s nice to have goals….

 Time was on my side so I decided to slot in another visit that I’ve been meaning to complete, a rather more civilised pub visit in Rotherhithe. I jumped on the nearest train I could find (praise be to the GPS again) and zoomed up to London Bridge for the next stage of my expedition. After an animated walk through Southwark I eventually located the Mayflower pub,  a relatively famous location due to its astonishing historical pedigree – by the name you may have discerned that this was the spot, back in 1620, that the pilgrim fathers set forth to establish the great cultural experiment of America. Like the Thamesmead mission I’ve yearned to visit this location for many years, in some sense of cosmic irony when I arrived the fucking pub was shut. At 3.00pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Still, I roll with the punches as visiting the site was the chief ambition and I enjoyed the walk,  Rotherhithe was quite an interesting area to investigate which curiously reminded me of my old stomping ground of Peterborough, it very much looks and feels like a New Town in the model of a Milton Keynes with its building facades and transit designs (plenty of speed calming roundabouts), a  relatively modern urban conurbation that betrays its location as a central London territory.  I was mystifled by this aura until my historical synapses flared into life and I realised that this area must have been utterly decimated during the Blitz, resulting in a major programme of regeneration during the intervening decades. I walked to Canada Water and tubed it home.

Continuing the French theme of recent posts and the present Kubrick material here is a 1999 documentary I’ve sourced from Google Video, there’s some good material in there which might also provide an hour long French revision exercise. If, like me, you’re hopeless at French you may try to attune your ears to the lower mix audio where you can pick up more than the French voiceover elucidates, plus of course some of the subtitles help. There’s no new real revelations to the arm-chair Kubrick academic such as yours truly, all the material has been covered in books and articles that I’ve acquired over the years but it was interesting to see both the Sue Lyon and Diane Johnson footage. Raphael also comes through as the twat he is in both languages – a multi-lingual twat, if you will. Ploughing through this and taking in another viewing of Coppola’s debut Dementia 13 has had the unsettling Patrick Magee occupy far too much of my recent eyeball stimuli activities, it’s a conspiracy I tell you. Still, it’s not like Stan didn’t invent the hysterical  ipad (00:37 and more obviously at 04:08) over forty years ago eh? Thats a joke by the way. Obviously.

  Finally, my blogging has finally yielded some tangible results. Courtesy of this crew, a cult film distributor based here in London I’ve been sent two movies to review and I get to keep the copies – nice. The first was Pontypool, an unusually claustrophobic Canadian cannibal themed horror flick where the deadly virus is communicated by language (recommended for its inventive design and premise) and Ai no mukidashi, a Japanese film from 2008 which looks absolutely fucking mental, not just for its partially sordid subject matter but also its four hour run-time. I haven’t watched it yet as it only arrived this morning, it’s quite a tantalising prospect to see as I hugely enjoyed director Sion Sono’s  gruesome Jisatsu Sākuru which was throughly refreshing in that particularly lunatic, Japanese way. So no Jennifer Aniston Rom-Com preview disks for me eh?

January 28, 2010 | Categories: Art, Film, London, Music, YouTube | Tags: Cinema, Clockwork Orange, Film, Film Location, Kubrick, London, Mayflower, Movies, Rotherthite, Thamesmead, Zoe Keating | 1 Comment